EXORCISM AT 60,000 FEET

Stars: Robert Miano, Bai Ling, Bill Moseley, Lance Henriksen, Kevin J. O’Connor, Robert Rhine, Kyle Jones, Silvia Spross, Kelli Maroney, Matthew Moy and Adrienne Barbeau.
Writers: Robert Rhine and Daniel Benton.
Director: Chad Ferrin.

Rating: ★ ★

The premise of Exorcism at 60,000 Feet reads like the opening to an inappropriate gag your drunk uncle barks out at Thanksgiving dinner. “Did you hear the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the dwarf on a flight to VietNam…,” it begins and, before any of your relatives can wrestle the sad, sick family jester to the ground, he screams and spits his way through a waffling, weird, wildly offensive mess of a joke.

In genre-speak, Exorcism at 60,000 Feet is that most dangerous meld of film types - the horror-comedy, which implies a measured balance of chills and giggles. Director Chad Ferrin, who impressed a few years back with the bloody urban thriller Parasites, doesn’t nail either horror or comedy with any degree of inspiration or skill. With co-writers Robert Rhine and Daniel Benton having to share some of the blame, Ferrin pitches for Airplane-meets-The Exorcist, but crash lands well short of the destination.

Like a lot of good comedies, Exorcism at 60,000 Feet opens on the mass murder of a family. Robert Miano plays hardened padre Father Romero, who arrives too late to save the deceased but just in time to identify the evil entity as ‘Garvin’, the resurrected spirit of his army buddy from ‘Nam. For some reason, he needs to return Garvin to VietNam, booking passage on the ‘hilariously’ titled Viet Kong Airways, the offensive moniker only made worse by its anachronism - will the target audience of first-time pot-smokers even know what is being referenced?

On board, the spirit of Garvin (played in terrible make-up by B-movie icon, Bill Mosely) is possessing the passengers, each one a grossly painted caricature of such wannabe comic stereotypes as the roided-up bodybuilder (Luca Pennazzato); the middle Eastern ‘potential terrorist’ (Gino Salvano); the peace-seeking Buddhist (Craig Ng); the anytime/anywhere sexpot (Stefanie Peti); the other anytime/anywhere sexpot (Jin N. Tonic, who shows some comedy chops); and, the Soprano-esque goombah (Johnny Williams). Most unforgivably tasteless is the ‘Mommy with toddler’ passengers, featuring Kelli Maroney (cult favourite from 1984’s Night of the Comet) as the mature-age woman who breastfeeds her obnoxious son Dukie, played by little person actor, Sammy the Dwarf.

Romero teams with orthodox rabbi Larry Feldman (co-scripter Rhine) and the flight crew, Amanda (Bai Ling, playing to the back row) and Thang (an occasionally funny Matthew Moy), to battle the demon, which manifests as a cheap-as-chips ‘green mist’. Garvin’s victims suffer ugly fates to remind the audience this is a ‘horror film’ - clean-cut Brad (Kyle Jones) meets a grisly end while ‘mile high’ clubbing; phone-obsessed millennial Ms Tang (Jolie Chi) must deal with an unwanted demon-pregnancy; and so on. Ferrin earns points for securing the likes of Lance Henriksen (as Captain Houdee...geddit?) and Adrienne Barbeau (pictured, above) for day-shoots, but their involvement is wasted on parts that prove just what good sports they are willing to be to pay some bills. 

The influence of the Zucker-Abrahams 1980 classic is everywhere, most notably in composer Richard Band’s shameless rip-off of Elmer Bernstein’s classic score, but there’s none of the comic pacing or inspired performances that made Airplane so memorable (or The Naked Gun series, which Ferrin also apes). Instead, the humour is of the ‘punch down’ variety - easy, ugly potshots based on race, gender or religion - placing Exorcism at 60,000 Feet dangerously close to the shock comedy stylings of a film like Uwe Boll’s Postal (2007).

That said, praise is certainly due cinematographer Christian Janss, who skilfully mimics the frantic camera moves George Miller employed in his Twilight Zone The Movie episode, ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’, and the effects team working under Joe Castro and Maricela Lazcano, who give exteriors shots of the plane careening through an otherworldly night sky legitimate authenticity.